A new processor allocation strategy with a high degree of contiguity in mesh-connected multicomputers

Abstract

Relaxing the contiguity condition in non-contiguous allocation can reduce processor fragmentation and increase processor utilization. However, communication overhead could increase due to the potential increase in message distances. The communication overhead depends on how the allocation request is partitioned and allocated to free sub-meshes. In this paper, a new non-contiguous processor allocation strategy, referred to as Greedy-Available-Busy-List (GABL for short), is suggested for the mesh network, and is compared against the existing non-contiguous and contiguous allocation strategies. To demonstrate the performance gains achieved by our proposed strategy, we have conducted simulation runs under the assumption of wormhole routing technique. The results have revealed that the new strategy can reduce communication overhead and considerably improve performance in terms of the job turnaround time, system utilization, and jobs finish time.